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Sunday, March 08, 2015

Overdue for a blog post, and I guess my news needs an official announcement!

I'm happy to announce that I have accepted a visiting post at the University of Miami for 9 months, beginning August 2015 and running through the academic year. This post is financially possible thanks to the generous Knight Foundation, which supports various faculty positions in journalism throughout the country. I’ll be helping Alberto Cairo get his new Data Visualization and Journalism track in the Interactive Media MFA off to a running start; I’ll be teaching data visualization and data analysis, including D3.js. I'll probably keep some side contract work going at the same time. Here's my favorite version of the news on Twitter:

I’ve always been wary of trying to teach D3 in any short workshop format — I’ve been asked and said “no” many times. However, the first class I’ll teach is a semester long, so it seems more feasible. To help prepare for this, I’ll also be a TA in this spring’s online Data Visualization and Infographics with D3 course co-taught by Alberto and Scott Murray (@alignedleft, screen-capped above), who is the author of a very nice introductory D3 book, Interactive Data Visualization for the Web. (If you’re reading about it now for the first time, the class filled up quickly to the cap set at 500 people. Maybe they can do it again if it’s successful.)

In other more minor teaching news, I did a guest lecture at CMU in Golan Levin’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on NLP (natural language processing) in Python; the files are all here. The most “interesting” part from Twitter’s perspective is the Bayesian detection of sex scenes in 50 Shades of Gray (because spam is boring). I first did this cocktail-party stunt at OpenVis Conf in 2013, and now I’ve finally released the data and code for it. These introductory lectures cover concepts that would be useful in any more advanced text visualization context; I hope to get a chance to expand on that subject while in Miami, too.

I’m also putting together a lynda.com class, Introduction to Data Analysis with Pandas, although I’ve been doing it veeerrrryyyy slowwwwlllyyyy.

Finally, related to teaching, I’m co-chair of OpenVis Conf this year. We are not quite sold out yet (as of this post), and I think you should come. This is a conference about how the visualization sausage is made — lots of educational talks!

I had planned to write 3 more sections on learning, teaching, and making, but there were some minefields in there about gender and sexism in tech. Not ready for prime time. No navel-gazing for now!